Menas Kafatos and I proffered this abstract (below) at last year’s Science and Non-Duality (SAND) conference. We have developed the ideas a bit further and, for a variety of reasons, are now referring to the theory as Monistic Awareness. Nonetheless the ideas are basically the same. The paper is in preparation. Hope you like!

Through successive, recursive, creative interactions, phenomena and entities at each level of scale self-organize into emergent phenomena and entities at each next higher scale, comprising the entire cosmos.

These triadic principles of complementarity, recursion, and creative interactivity (wherein “sentience” is the special case of the biological) are reflected throughout all scales. Though emergentist/materialist positions predominate in contemporary discourse regarding consciousness, the primacy of this non-dual conscious reality, which we emphasize is the deepest possible “panpsychist” perspective, is not contradicted by any known scientific phenomena. Also, unlike most emergentist positions, it is inclusive of the inextricable linkage between observer and observed, subject and object, decisively revealed by quantum mechanics. Indeed, at all levels of scale above the quantum realm, quantum-like effects – such as uncertainty, complementarity, superposition, entanglement, non-locality – reflecting such interconnectivity are recognized.

Corollaries of Non-Dual Conscious Realism include that: materiality is not implicit in the universe, but is entirely a scale dependent phenomenon; the “hard problem” of qualia is subsumed by confirmation that all phenomena of the universe are qualia within consciousness; neural correlates of consciousness are not how consciousness is created, but are, rather, the ways in which the nervous systems (human or other) transduce consciousness into adaptive, species-specific perceptions and behaviors. Individual consciousness and associated qualia are part of the universal, non-dual conscious reality.

When I have some time to catch up on this blog I’ll post each vid and describe them one by one to make things easy, but this is the page that contains my bio and all the posted vids. Check out the whole site! Amazing material, both in the source interviews and the themed television episodes that are spun from them…

Thanks to Robert Lawrence Kuhn and his Closer to Truth team for this! :)

Series Description: Increasingly, cognitive science presents us with a vision of mind as grounded in the complex transformative processes of life, while neuroscience presents us with a vision of the brain as a complex adaptive system that constantly reshapes itself in response to context, experience, and practice.How can this vision of complexity and transformation enrich our understanding of consciousness—the felt experience of awareness across waking, dreaming, sleeping, and dying? In this intensive program, we explore our lived experience of awareness in relation to our living bodies and brains seen as complex adaptive systems. We focus especially on the themes of “embodied cognition,” “emergent processes,” and “enaction” (cognition as embodied action). Neuroscientists, philosophers, Buddhist scholars, and Zen teachers explore these themes through presentations and discussion interspersed with periods of meditation practice throughout each day.

Series Description: Increasingly, cognitive science presents us with a vision of mind as grounded in the complex transformative processes of life, while neuroscience presents us with a vision of the brain as a complex adaptive system that constantly reshapes itself in response to context, experience, and practice.How can this vision of complexity and transformation enrich our understanding of consciousness—the felt experience of awareness across waking, dreaming, sleeping, and dying? In this intensive program, we explore our lived experience of awareness in relation to our living bodies and brains seen as complex adaptive systems. We focus especially on the themes of “embodied cognition,” “emergent processes,” and “enaction” (cognition as embodied action). Neuroscientists, philosophers, Buddhist scholars, and Zen teachers explore these themes through presentations and discussion interspersed with periods of meditation practice throughout each day.

Episode Description: Al Kaszniak kicks off this opening session of Zen Brain: Consciousness, Complex Systems, and Transformation by stating that this program is intended to “push the boundaries” of knowledge and will touch upon “new thinking” in relating complex systems theory to areas of inquiry such as neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and contemplative practice. The Zen Brain faculty then briefly introduce themselves before handing the floor over to Neil Theise. Neil presents a wide-ranging introduction to consciousness and complex systems theory that draws upon ideas in physics, biology, and spirituality. After presenting the basics of complex systems theory, Neil unfolds some very novel thinking on how the emergence of the universe can be viewed in terms of three overlapping processes: complementarity, recursion, and sentience.